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Those Amazing Antigravity Machines?
surfimp writes "Wired is running an interesting article about 'lifters', hovering UFO-looking vehicles that have no moving parts, no onboard power supply, and are capable of levitating simply through the application of high amounts of electrical current. Enthusiasts claim their vehicles are examples of a nascent antigravity technology, while more traditional scientists - including some funded by NASA - view them as nothing more than contraptions harnessing ionic winds."
check out americanantigravity.com
This is a site run by this guy I used to work with...pretty interesting stuff.
I think it messed with his head a little though.
Does this mean all US citizens can now use it? Since NASA develops its things with public money I seem to recall that they become available to everyone.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Anyone look at the power/pound? .54 Watt. .54 W/ .003 lb = 180 W/lb..
Let's see.. 27000 V, 20 microamp, for 3 millipound.. think that works out to something like
Anyone know how this compares to say
"normal" engines?
Seems to be a really good battery, unless you have a tether (or beamed power).
James Randi, the famous skeptic, has this to say about this subject (http://www.randi.org/jr/060702.html):
"Go take a look at http://www.americanantigravity.com/index.html and see very interesting videos of what the supporters seem to believe is a breakthrough in science. If this device is "antigravity," then a pogo stick and a crow are both antigravity items, as well.
I saw a similar demo at the University of Toronto back in 1946. That demo used a flat circular coil of wire; I believe this is the same thing, but a triangular form leads one away from the "induction" conclusion. It's a matter of high-voltage electrical fields generated by something that you don't see in the videos; there's always a source of high voltage present, a CRT (computer monitor or TV receiver) or a HV power supply, just out of camera view. What's also not obvious here is that the triangular frame -- which weighs only a few grams -- is tethered down by very fine invisible threads, a fact which when known, makes the apparent "maneuvering" appearance less mysterious by far."
Levitation lives!
And yes, this one does work in a vacuum.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
When my friend first showed me the site, I thought it was a hoax. He bitched about it enough that we decided to build some at school. We opened up some monitors to use as 25,000 volt power supplies, and wired one up using very thin wire and balsa wood. The damn thing flew alright. Power-to-weight ratio sucked, though. The thing was hooked up to a monitor (don't know much it was actually dissipating) but could only lift about its body weight (2 or 3 grams for our model). The nifty thing about it is that while we were working on it, we left it in the robotics lab labeled "Anti-gravity machine, do not touch!"
:)
PS> If you try this at home, remember, high voltages arc very easily! One of the times we tried it, there was a class in the lab at the time. One guy was so fascinated that the electric charge in the wires made the hair on his arm stand on end that he got a little too close
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
And we also know how those sparky engines on the Logos and the Neb, and the hovercars and nuclear/dark storm bombers in the second renaisannce work.
Pretty neat. All you need is an abundant source of energy.
Hey it's in the article:
no onboard fuel
And it's in the slashdot blurb:
no onboard power supply
What they don't say is that this sucker is electrical.....so to make this thing fly 2.6 million light years, you need 2.6 million light years of extension cord.
Oh yeah, you need atmosphere too.
Nifty, but useless.
-ted
I'm curious where the lift comes from then in the cases where they've blocked the upper wires with straws, or placed a piece of cardboard between one of the upper wires and the lower section. I'm not saying this is antigravity, but it would seem strange that it could be ion wind with no wind.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
You think blimps don't have propellors? Balloons don't have giant torches which have to be opened to go up and flaps on the top to go down?
With these things, it would be concievable to do everything with a few radio dials. One for lift, one for the left thruster, one for the right thruster, and one for reverse.
Okay, let's work this out. He uses a 50kV at 4 milli-amp power supply. That's 200 W power supply. With that he creates approximately a pound of upward thrust.
You want to create 1500 lbs upward thrust. You'll need 300 kilowatts of power. Let's say you want to run it for one hour. You've used 300 kilowatt-hours (1.08 gigajoules) of energy.
According to here, you've actually used 8.19 gallons of automotive gasoline to power your device.
On the other hand, if your truck now weighs only 1000 lbs... you might be on to something!!
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
While these devices are only ion engines, I still think that it may be an interesting step towards discovering a true anti-gravity device. But I can't believe that electromagnatism and gravity can be unified at only a few kV of electricity. If that were the case, anti-gravity would have been discovered years ago. Besides, all voltage is is the difference in the number of electrons between two points. Perhaps at high enough voltages the gravitational attraction of the electrons at one point would cause some kind of anti-gravity effect at the opposite point, but I would assume that it would need to be a HUGE potential difference coupled with an extremely small device. Perhaps it isn't voltage at all that we need to look at to unify electromagnetism and gravity. If, that is, they can be unified at all.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
http://www.amasci.com/emotor/emot1.html
You can use a TV screen as your high voltage source.
I had a variation of this spinning on my office PC a few years back.
Nothing says geek quite like a monitor powered ion motor on your desk.
http://www.cpsc.gov/library/foia/foia03/os/GFCIs.p df
Two hundred a year dead in residential electrocutions, four a year just from do-it-yourself microwave oven repairs.
Many people have survived 120V shocks, but then many people have survived unprotected sex in Haiti.
This Thomas Townsend Brown site has everything from his family history to research documents and patents.
Is this any different from what these guys did? Actually, this link seemed fake to me when I first saw it on slashdot. They claim to use DIAMAGNETIC LEVITATION, not anti-gravity. I'm still waiting for the home model.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
I don't recall the exact number either (I know it's in a school book around here), but I do recall my teacher asking us once :
:
"Do you know how we know (N)mA kills ?"
Conjectures of theoretical resistance in a human body through the various organs etc. were supplied, but all dismissed for the supposed true answer
"The best way to find out is by experimentation. Mr. Mengele did just that. And now we know."
That was followed by the rest of the hour discussing the ethics of using this data knowing that it was obtained through such means, and whether the apparent blind acceptance by us to use these data would encourage other scientists (if one can call Mengelere that) to perform similar atrocities in future quests for knowledge.
Given the dangerous levels of electricity the use seems limited. Also I wonder how well these could be kept over the generators? Wouldn't they fly right off their power source? How effecient is it to 'beam' power to fly a load compared to just putting the power source in the flyer itself and flying in a traditional way? Sounds cool but seems it'll need a lot of work to be useful.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
This was covered in an article a year and a half ago...
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http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/
Here's the best "practical" use of this "technology"...
http://www.sharperimage.com/us/en/catalog/product
I've got your sig, right here.
How much current can you survive? physics.mps.ohio-state.edu
That's right as little as 0.1 amps can be fatal. A standard wall socket can supply 20 amps.
Now off you go to build your very own lifter.
For those of you who read the article and see that yes it is possible and no it's not anti-gravity; you might want to do a quick calculation of the breakdown voltage of air. (Lookup Paschen's Law in a physics textbook.) So you have an estimate of how far your high voltage supply can arc and how close you can let the cats get to your lifter.
http://www.americanantigravity.com/hutchison.html
Lifters are well and good, but that reeks of large-scale BS.
webpage
Jeez, you mean we've been listening to these stupid UFO stories for 50 years now, and it's all because all these crackpots didn't notice a slight breeze????
I'm going to GUESS that anybody who noticed it would assume that the "gravity field" was responsible for moving the air. It wasn't mentioned in this article, although it's mentioned plenty of other places, that the folks who buy into this stuff believe that anything that's inside the field (i.e. between the + and - plates) is subject to the "gravitic force"... and that would include air, which would be moved around as a result.
And NOT that I believe in this stuff, but it would have been interesting for the author to have pursued the B-2 angle. They may not be using this stuff for gravitic propulsion, but they're using it FOR SOMETHING, i.e. the B-2 has a + charge on the leading edge of the wing and a - charge on the trailing edge (or vice versa and who cares anyway). It's classified, so it must be interesting, no?
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Evgenij Barsoukov has a page with a pretty convincing theory of lifters here. His equasions predict the thrust and efficiency of models built by many experimenters with fairly good accuracy.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Me and a few friends built some of these at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign for our engineering open house. They were a big hit, winning us several awards.
:)
These things are basically asymmetric capacitors: a thin wire loop is one plate, foil on balsa wood beneath the wire is the second plate.
For a power source, we took apart a CRT monitor. Gotta love those flyback transformers.
Anyways, here's our website with nifty pictures. We plan to do this project again next year and hopefully win more awards.
http://dilbert.cen.uiuc.edu/soc/psiphi/lifters/
If somebody, (obeying the laws of thermodynamics), managed to build an anti-gravity device, how long would the military hold on to that technology before allowing it into the realm of public industry? 5 years? 20 years?
Here's another question. .
Could somebody invent such a device, raise the capitol, hire the people, and create the industry required to bring the technology to market without the military finding out about it beforehand?
Yeah. That's what I figure as well.
And so finally. . . (And this is my problem with 95% of the tech-dreaming on Slashdot.)
Why do so many people bother getting excited at all by the comings and goings of publicaly accessible science and industrial advancement? --When all such advancement is not really advancement at all, but merely the controlled release of ancient technology which somebody already came up with fifty years ago and which the military sees no further need to keep under wraps?
Cuz, you see, any 'announcements' about any new developments which matter, are ALL 100% P.R. bullshit. Amazingly, everybody pretty much knows this, because the logical steps needed to reach that conclusion are painfully obvious. --And yet, most people quietly go along with the charade as though the U.S. military-industrial complex wasn't actually a multi-trillion dollar goliath which controls nearly every aspect of science and industry.
Most of the tech-geeks I've ever met are just a bunch of grown-up kids playing at pretend, wishing for a Star Fleet future while trying like hell to ignore the 10 ton gorilla in the living room.
-FL
The lack of control thing is really just because nobody bothers to try. It's like building a helicopter rotor and engine and just turning it on. It'll flip all the fuck over unless you tie it down or something. I'm guessing if you put little stablizer lifters on the sides of your big lifter you get lighting going in between them or other bad things, but if you did something like that, I can't see this being any more unstable than any other kind of propulsion.
BTW, if the Nebechunezzar runs on lifters, why does it need an EMP? Anything more conductive than a petrified Carrie-Anne Moss ought to be attracting ridiculous arcs by the time it gets within tense music distance, no?
I'm mostly in agreement, but then again, if the best we can do to conceptualize the force of gravity is a depression/curvature in space-time, maybe there's a way to create a bubbling out of space-time... kind of like a hernia in the fabric of space-time.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Somewhere I read once about the military developing transports that work like this. Probably read it on slashdot. Anyway... imagine a nuclear power plant in the heart of this thing generating the power for the ion lifter... Somebody in this discussion already figured the power at 180 W/lb. Let's say you want a craft that can carry 100 tons (200,000 lbs). That'd take 36MW. The nuclear reactors around here generate over 1000MW. Wonder how much they'd weigh scaled down to 36MW. Hmmm... that'd be one heck of a ship. Imagine how long (years) it could hover in the air without being refueled... until the reactor rods were spent...
Okay, folks... don't flame me... just thinking out loud...
is that it stops you being stuck to the Earth's surface. Since the Earth is: a) rotating (at 1038mph at the equator) b) orbiting the sun (at 67,000mph) c) in a solar system orbiting the galaxy (at 558,000mph) that is itself in a galaxy drifing in our local group (at 669,600mph) anyone who stops being affected by gravity, even for a split second, would end up pretty far away. I believe it's called 'absolute rest'.
"Tesla demonstrated "beaming power" at the beginning of the last century. If things had turned out slightly differently for him, we might all be receiving our electricity wirelessly, and you wouldn't be making snide remarks about it."
Oh please. Spare me. The fact that we aren't "receiving our electricity wirelessly" has nothing at all to do with how things "turned out" for Tesla. It has to do with the fact that while it is theoretically possible (hell, I've even done this on a small scale for demonstation purposes), it's completely and utterly impractical. The traditional tesla coil is omnidirectional and therefore any energy you put into the thing is spread out uniformly about the tesla, and the vast majority of it doesn't actually reach the device you want to power. This is in stark contrast to a wire, which will take all of your energy from point A to point B (minus some lost to resistence of course, but that's a comparatively small effect). And I haven't even mentioned the side effects of the Tesla approach. The things tend to ionize the air and create a lot of ozone and there's no way that sort of approach could be healthy for people in the long run if it was actually implemented on a large scale.
This of course has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, which would most likely involve beaming power using masers or lasers, which, being focused beams, have the advantage of not spreading out very much as they travel great distances. This sort of approach is at least feasible, but there are a lot of details that have yet to be worked out.
Anyway, I will leave you with two parting thoughts:
1. The Martian atmosphere is much thinner and of a very different composition than the Earth's. How do we know that this sort of technology would be nearly as effective there as it is on Earth?
2. If you're just going to beam energy to your craft anyway, why not just use that energy to power a more conventional drive? What is the real advantage of this approach?
Well, I've rambled enough.
Physics is good